obama to turn it around... >> narrator: the cascade of bad news began with the economy. >> fear swept through the markets... >> he had to start thinking about this the day after he was elected. >> this was the most eventful and consequential presidential transition in american history. >> we were all worried about what we were seeing. we knew that the credit system was pretty quickly headed towards something that looked a lot like seizure. >> narrator: the president-elect was told that in the two months since lehman brothers crashed, the panic on wall street had only gotten worse. >> what we were facing was something that, really, he had never contemplated, never experienced. >> narrator: unemploymenwas nearly seven percent and climbing. the stock market was down more than 6,000 points. >> there was a growing sense of calamity. this could be the most climactic economic crisis in all of american history, that we were that close to a complete meltdown. >> obama at that moment gets a real glimpse of the future: disaster is coming. >> at the end of the conversation, there is basically no